My 6th-grade daughter came home yesterday to report that her class was taken
on a trip to a local Holocaust Museum (in Commack, Long Island). I asked if
she had been shocked by any of the displays. “No. It was really pretty
boring. Very boring.” Hm. So… what, exactly had she learned from the
trip? “Oh, you know. Racism is bad. Respect for people who are different.
All that.”
Now, our Nellie is not the keenest observer, nor the most reliable reporter,
of her life events — about average for a bright 6th-grader, I think. She
does, however, take an interest in things preszented to her, is popular with
her teachers, and has no trace of that awful worldly-wise teen attitude that
finds pretty much everything “boring.” I can’t help thinking that there’s
something wrong here. If I had known in advance that she was being taken to
a Holocaust museum, and had been asked to list my preferences for her
reactions, “bored” would have been way, way down the list. Isn’t there
something wrong with a system of education that can make the Holocaust
“boring.”
Footnote. “They gave us a lunch,” Nellie added. Something appropriate? I
wondered, without much hope. Kosher, at least? “Pizza.”